Unpretty
Sharon Carter Rogers
Howard, Sep 2008, $12.99
ISBN: 9781416566496

A West Virginia police detective is kidnapped by the cult members of the Michelangelus Movement, who perform macabre experiments on people based on the work of the Renaissance artist. Soon after that abduction, a psychopathic serial killer visits the Collins Galleria of Books where he thinks the exhibition of Michelangelo's work in a surrealistic display is being held. The owner Hummingbird Collins notices him and directs him to the Conklin Art Gallery and then she escorts him there. She sees him enter and when he leaves minus his coat a bomb blows up the gallery.

She is injured and rushed to the hospital; when she gets out she isolates herself from her friends and family. Finally she informs her brother that she saw the bomber who calls himself Number Twenty-Six, who has warned her to remain silent and not go to the police or he will insure her family will die horrifically. Believing her phone is tapped, her bother asks a cleric friend to go to the police with a picture she drew of the killer. Attracted to her and furious she went to the authorities, Number Twenty-Six kidnaps her while the cops remain clueless as to whom he is. Only a physically injured young person suffering from multiple personality disorder might with luck save Hummingbird's life, but more likely will die too as part of the Last Judgment.

This is a fast-paced thriller filled with plenty of action and more action; in fact things occur so fast from the onset it takes readers some time to comprehend what is going on especially in the mindset of the cult; the audience never quite learns the where all of an urban monk, who serves as the link between the police, Hummingbird, and the cult. Fascinatingly the monk Ready Robinson and the violent Michelangelus Movement steal the show from the beleaguered heroine.

Harriet Klausner